For a film that dispenses a lot of backstory information via intertitles, you are left with a lot of questions when the credits finally roll. For example, how in the world did Irish film-maker Sinéad O’Shea gain access to her main subject: James Cox Chambers, AKA “Fergie”, the American heir to a multimillion-dollar fortune – whom we first meet as the founding member and bankroller of a communist community of less than a dozen people in Alford, a town in rural Massachusetts. A scion of the wealthy Cox family, a liberal clan who have backed leftist causes in the past, Fergie wants to take things even further politically and is willing to use his own hefty inheritance (about $250m) to support his fellow communards’ commitment to learning, self-sustaining farm work and running a jujitsu studio and gym that won’t accept members of the police as members.
But when the group decide to protest at Elbit Systems, the Israeli-owned arms manufacturer, its actions slide into “criminal mischief and criminal trespassing”, according to reports. Several Alford members are arrested, including one Paige Belanger; O’Shea’s film cuts back and forth between interviews with Belanger and other communards and Chambers, who has scarpered to Tunisia. Although he pays for Belanger’s defence and covers other costs arising from the action, considerable rancour rises between Fergie, Paige and other former Alford community members, that O’Shea perhaps wisely doesn’t let the film get too bogged down with trying to parse.
